TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 23

    “Please come down to my office right now, I really need to talk with you.”
     There was a pause while the other party thought it over.
     “You’re not lying on the floor naked are you, Cass?”
     “Geez Joy, of course not,” he said irritably in the direction of the speakerphone.  “But actually, what do you care? You are my mistress,” he added winningly.
     “Not on the carpet in your office, I’m not,” said Joy.
     His Enormity, Mayor Cass Tamberlaine, was in the throes of an idea and desperately desired a second opinion.  It was three a.m.—the hour at which Cass invariably got his best ideas.  It was not, unfortunately, the hour at which Joy Pommery felt best disposed to listen to them.
     “Very well,” she told him wearily.  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
     Cass switched off the phone and paced the deep-pile sea on which, at one end of the room, his desk sat marooned like a derelict freighter.  He went to the window to look out at the grimy city, sparkling, in what he always felt was an over-compensatory way, with twinkling lights.  Lights going wink wink wink all night long. 
     The lights always irritated him.  In burning through the darkness, in so effortlessly rising above it, they always seemed to possess some kind of secret and superior knowledge—as if they were little twinkling minds.  Maddening sprights of light—the city’s fireflies.  A million little pinpricks of conscience.
     “Alright,” he muttered out loud to himself, turning away from the window, “so I smoke too much and eat too much and am okay a little bit heavier than I should to be and, yes, am grateful once in a while for the artificial liftoff certain chemical compounds provide, surely that’s not enough to piss off the public, is it?  Beyond Reality TV shows and fried foods, people don’t know what the hell they what anyhow!”
     He went over to the mirror on the bathroom door and took another look.  Of course he didn’t like what he saw there.  He never liked what he saw.  He was indisputably a mountain of a man—a mountain that was soft and tumbledown, billowed, not a mountain that was hard and craggy.  He looked as if he were melting.
     “I’ve got to get in shape,” he said to his always unsympathetic reflection, a reflection that, he felt, invariably sneered back at him whenever he talked to it.  There was no help anywhere.
     Except that Joy was coming.
     “Godammit where is she anyhow?” he asked his empty office, and, receiving no reply beyond the disgruntled conch-shell roar of the shadowy, unused spaces through which he sluggishly paced, day after day, night after night, like a caged hippo, he threw himself disconsolately onto the floor.
     Lying there, bereft of comfort, unsustained by ideas or insight, Cass felt three quite different things all at the same time.  First, he felt, once again, like taking all his clothes off.   Second, he felt like having a big bucket of white chocolate ice cream.  And third, he wanted to feel the cool hand of Joy Pommery gently wiping his copiously perspiring forehead with his pocket handkerchief and whispering to him that all would be well.
      How could all—or anything at all—be well?  Someone one was, after all, trying to kill him.  He thought again about the horrible, beautifully painted death threats that had been sent to him—and were now stacked in one of his desk drawers.  To tell the truth, he couldn’t decide whether to give them to the police or have them framed and hung on the walls.
     But he did have this one idea, and he wanted to see what Joy felt about it.  If she ever turned up.
     Happily, at just that exact moment, there was a dainty knock—or maybe it was a weary knock—at the office door, after which Joy let herself in.
     “Joy!  Thank God!”
     “Glad to see me, are you?” she smiled at him.  “I sort of half expected to find you lying naked on the floor with a hopeless erection!”
     “Well, it almost came to that,” he told her. 
     “You said you had an idea you wanted to run past me.”
     “That’s right,” he told her. “Look at these.”
      He went to his desk and came back with three or four glossy-looking pamphlets.
     “What do you think of these?”
     Joy glanced at them.
     “Isolation tanks?” she asked.
     “Flotation tanks.  I think to float sounds more appealing than to be isolated.
     “What do you want with one of these?” Joy asked him.  “They’re sensory deprivation tanks.  They’re filled with warm water and Epsom salts and you get into the tank nude and somebody closes the lid and you float face-up in the dark and you can’t see anything, or hear anything or smell anything or feel anything.  Cass, you’d go mad in three minutes!  You’d be clawing and scratching to get out, screaming a dead, echoless scream like some overweight version of one of those Edgar Allan Poe buried-alive stories!”
     Cass looked crestfallen.
     “I thought it’d be good for my nerves,” he told her.
     “It’d probably introduce you to nerves you didn’t even know you had!” said Joy.
     “Well I’ve got a lot on my mind, Joy,” said Cass, “and I need some relief.  I need to calm down.  These things are supposed to help.”
     “I just can’t see one working for you, Cass.”
     “Well, anyway I want to give it a shot.”
     “Where are you going to put the damned thing?”
     “I thought right here in my office.”
     “You’re going to have to smuggle it in.  And it’s going to be as big as a Volkswagen!
     “Why will I have to smuggle it in?”
     “Because,” Joy told him patiently, marvelling once again at his lack of political savvy, “it isn’t a good idea for the already beleaguered citizens of Toronto to picture their mayor, naked, floating heavily like an iceberg in a closed, black, coffin-like box, whiling away his mayoralty time dreaming ancient dreams of nothingness in the dark.”
    “Okay so they don‘t have to know.”
    “Much better they shouldn’t,” said Joy.
    
           

        

TORONTO: A NOVEL--CHAPTER 22


 
     The next morning, at ten o’clock, May opened the bookstore herself. Barbara was coming in later, closer to noon—probably weighed down with pastries for their tea-break.  May sighed.  She’d had enough pastry for a lifetime.
     A couple of hours before May opened up, Michael was sitting in the living-room he used as a studio and finishing a cup of instant coffee, now grown tepid and, oddly enough, rather waxy.  After pushing back four or five books from the edge of a shelf, he then put the empty mug on the free space, making a mental note about where he’d left it—which, as it turned it, was right in front of two books by Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows, about 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking.  Careful not to dislodge his cup, he wiggled Wanderlust from its place and riffled through it.  “I like walking because it is slow,” Solnit proclaimed on page ten, “and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.”
     “I’ll go for a walk,” Michael said to himself. 
”At about three miles an hour.”   
     Michael smiled to himself at how associative he was, about how easily he was led about, from interest to interest from idea to idea.  He was Toad of Toad Hall, he thought, and then laughed at how even this brief thought about Mr. Toad was enough to send him back to reread The Wind in the Willows.  It would be all too easy, Michael felt, to head into an endlessly burgeoning, blossoming retroactive life, his sensibility borne backwards, association by association, until had lost track of the present entirely.
     “I need an anchor,” he told himself, not entirely understanding what he meant.  He knew that one of the things he meant was that he really didn’t find the present all that hot a place to spend his time.  He also felt, sometimes, that he needed to know somebody else exceedingly well.
     He took his glance at Solnit seriously and began to get ready to go out.  For some reason he was more depressed these last few days than he usually was.  Well, actually, he knew some of the reasons: a brief—but not nearly brief enough—acquaintance with Bliss Carmen and her silly dog Fish, meeting and putting up with her strange pal, the surly Homer Rubik and his new Old Master drawings and watercolours, and even the stale brownie clerk at the convenience store.  It wasn’t all that much, he thought, it wasn’t anything, but it was enough to keep him disconsolate for several days now.  He can scarcely believe that he had offered to write an article about Homer and his outlandish facility.  And the thing of it was, he’d probably go right ahead and do it too.
     Anyhow, walking had always helped to restore his good spirits in the past, and this morning he would walk.  He would walk and walk and walk and would begin to feel better, he felt sure, with every step.
     Where should he walk to?  For Michael always found that while aimless, goal-less walking had a certain beauty—a metaphysical, for-itself meaning—any walk-off-your-depression walk pretty much required a destination. 
And what invariably made Michael feel better when he was feeling down, anxious or angry, was to browse for awhile in a used bookstore.
     The used bookstores had been disappearing steadily over the past few years, falling dark and silent to the easy inrush of stay-at-home bookbuyers, clicking their purchases through on Abebooks, Amazon, Alibris, or just settling into the little lighted lozenges of Kindle and other ebook readers.  And of course a lot of people had just stopped reading entirely.  Books, which had once been seen as sites of ideas, wisdom, eloquence and the necessary truth, books which had once been regarded as the agencies of ascension, were now looked upon as merely oppressive.  Books, Michael supposed, just took up entirely too much space in this weightless, speed-of-light world.  Michael understood this, but he didn’t want to.
      And so, for him, the used bookstore had become a haven.  A place of sanctuary.  A soft, quiet way-station on the superhighway of a proliferating pseudo-culture that amounted to little, as far as Michael could tell, but the bureaucratic onrush of me-first practicalities.  It was a world he had to live in—as everybody else did too—but when it got too abrasive and therefore too silly, he could at least repair to a used bookstore.
      Which was where he was headed this morning.
     Michael left his apartment, in an old house out near High Park, walked up to Bloor Street and turned east.
He strode along steadily for a couple of hours, pausing now and then at two different Book City stores, to flip through their glossy remainders, stopped once at a Second Cup for an unnecessary and unsatisfying cup of coffee, browsed quickly through a couple of video stores, and, finally getting as far east as Spadina Avenue (all the while trying not to think about the always looming Bliss Carmen, who lived in the subway station), turned south and walked three blocks to one of his favourite remaining book stores—a dusty, fecund place called Books At Large.  He hadn’t been there for six months.
     He glanced at his watch.  It was ten fifteen.  He gazed for a minute of two at the books in the front window (some Sherlock Holmes, Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night,
a handsome pocket-sized edition of Don Quixote, Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card, Roland Barthes’ The Eiffel Tower, Alan Mooreheads’s The White Nile…Studs Lonigan...Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City….).  And then opened the door and went in.
     May was sitting at the desk at the back of the store.  She looked up when she heard the door open and, for some reason that was not yet clear to her, smiled warmly at Michael.  He smiled back, and made his way carefully down the aisle towards her.
     “Good morning,” he said.
     “Good morning,” she replied, wondering if she could help with the strange purposefulness that seemed, at the moment, to animate him.  “Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
     “You know, “ Michael  told her, “the fact is that when I started out for a walk early this morning, and decided to end up you here, I just wanted to walk for a long time and then…well, you know…browse for a bit.”
     “Yes?” said May.
     “Yes, but now, suddenly, I have this sudden desire for a particular book by a beautiful, not-very-well-known Welsh writer named John Cowper Powys.  The novel is called Wolf Solent.  It’s pretty hard to find, I think, and you probably don’t have any of his books…really, I’d be surprised if you had!”
     May looked at him in some amazement.
     “But we do!” she told him, rather taken aback herself that they actually did.  Indeed she’d been looking at it just a few days ago, wondering about its odd title, not entirely certain how to pronounce the author’s name.  “Come, I’ll show it to you.”
     She got up and wandered along the far wall of shelves until she got to the “P” section.  Michael followed her, all the while admiring, more than he had intended to, her grace, the litheness of her moments, even the swing of her long, shiny black hair. 
     “Look!” said, pulling from the shelf a superb, two-volume boxed set of the novel.  The slipcase carried a noble photograph of the theatrically handsome John Cowper Powys.  May loved the book already, though she hadn’t read a single sentence of it.  She glanced again at the slipcase.
     “I’m afraid it’s rather expensive,” she told him.
     “How much is it?”
     “It’s sixty dollars—for the two volumes.”
     Michael was suddenly flooded with happiness.  He didn’t have a lot of money, and he knew he ought not to be so extravagant.  But he wanted the book with a deep, ecstatic kind of hunger, not because it was a beautiful edition of a truly great book, and not because of the bravado of its price but….it was hard to explain it to himself…because he had already—albeit inadvertently-- made the book into a sort of connection between him and May.  He smiled at her.
     “I’ll take it,” he told her.
     “I want to read it now too,” she said, with the beginnings of a sudden new passionate shyness in her voice.
     Michael looked again at the book.  Then he looked again at May.
     “I don’t mean to be forward or anything but…look, will you come and have a cup of coffee with me, after you’ve finished here today?”
     “Yes,” she told him.
           
            

TORONTO: A NOVEL—CHAPTER 21

   It was raining today in the city, and maybe nowhere else but here, so forceful a rain did it seem, long grey veils of it, washing down. 
     The low places in the sidewalks filled up with water and people out walking made split-second decisions about whether to go around puddles or whether to splash right on through them.
     May gazed from the window of the bookshop where she worked part time.  The wet street looked silvery and corrugated through the glass.  Because May felt like weeping, the raindrops halting down the window looked like tears.  Like everybody weeping at once.
     She turned away, thinking that Barbara was going to get awfully wet and was it worth it, really, to take her umbrella and walk all the way to Little Italy just to buy them a couple of squares of tiramisu to go with their tea?  Barbara did this often.  Too often, May thought.  She wanted her cup of green tea, but she didn’t need a great slab of something sweet to go with it.  Well, it was Barbara’s store, after all.
     As she turned away from the window, her eyes fell upon a huge brick-like book she hadn’t noticed on Wednesday, a giant one-volume paperback edition of Richardson’s Clarissa, published by Penguin Books.  She pried it from the shelf and riffled through it.  Fourteen hundred pages.  All in letters. An epistolary novel, she thought to herself.  A novel made of epistles.
     And for some reason, the ungainly book seemed suddenly remarkably appealing to her.  She read the back cover: “How Clarissa, in resisting parental pressure to marry a loathsome man for his money, falls prey to Lovelace, is raped and dies, is the bare outline of a story that blossomed in all directions under Richardson’s hands”.  
     The outline, thought May, is decidedly more lurid than it is bare.  But there was something so absurdly funny—and deeply appealing—about the author’s story having “blossoming in all directions” under his hands.  May felt strangely attracted to the book.  It promised to be a huge edifice of words, a wash of milky, repetitive, undemanding language that she suddenly knew would be just what she was looking for.
     The bell over the front door jangled and Barbara came in from the rain, bearing the white cardboard box May knew would contain the desserts. 
     “How’s everything been?” Barbara asked, shivering out of her raincoat and leaning her sodden umbrella in the corner. “Quiet?”
     “Very,” May replied, clutching her Clarissa.
     “What’s that?” asked Barbara.  May held the book out to her.
     “Clarissa?” Barbara lifted the tiramisu carefully from its box and lowered it onto plates. “What for?”
     May gazed at the big book and felt defensive.  “I feel it could help me with my English”, she replied.
     “How?” asked Barbara, thinking it strange that a young law student from Hong Kong should find anything helpful about such a juggernaut of a book.
     “I don’t know”, said May quietly, looking glumly at her Tiramisu and accepting a cup of tea.  Barbara reached for the book, held it up in the dusty light and glanced at the back cover.
     “Nobody back home is pressuring you to marry a loathsome man for his money, are they?” she asked gaily, giving the book back.
     “No”, May replied quietly.  They ate their tiramisu and drank their tea and looked out at the rain.  May opened the book again.  “I was still silent, looking down, the tears in my eyes”, she read to herself.  This was what she wanted.  An endless rush of clear language, animated to no purpose, eventful without incident, soft and sheeted and continuous as the rain against the window.


TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 20

     Coal Blackstone was browsing through the morning paper, cozily nestled back onto the warm, hairless chest of her photographer and sometime lover, Lincoln Ford.    
     “I see his lardship, Heavyweight Mayor Cass, finally let it drop that he’s been receiving death threats,” Coal told Linc.
     “Does he sound scared?” Linc wanted to know, carefully negotiating a second demitasse of espresso over and around the mellifluous landscape of Coal’s golden torso.
     “It’s sort of hard to read between the lines,” she told him.  “You know that calculated blandness politicians employ.  But offhand, yes, I’d say old Cass sounds a bit shaken.  You can almost feel a tremor in the type from time to time,” she added gaily.
     Linc drained his coffee and put his cup down on the night table.  He put his arms around Coal’s waist and then, after gently removing her paper and folding it up next to his cup, lifted his arms so that they encircled her just below her breasts.
     “Did I ever tell you about the beauty of your ribcage?” he asked her.
     “My ribcage?  No, I don’t believe you have,” she replied dreamily, wriggling herself down a bit so that his arms were now confronted by the responsibility of her breasts.
     “Well, smiled Linc, “I was going to tell you about the beauty of your ribcage, but now you’ve gone and distracted me with bosoms!”
     “Oh come on, Linc, say things about my ribs.  Everything’s already been said about breasts, but nobody 
ever talks ribs.”
     “Okay, well I was just going to say that the ribcage is sort of like a rigid lampshade, protecting the heart and the other vital organs that are housed inside it–which are fragile, like the lightbulb in the lamp!”
     “Why Linc,” Coal said, swallowing the last of her coffee, “you clever thing!”
     Linc grinned.  “And you have a very pretty lampshade,” he told her, gently cupping her left breast in his hand.
     She smiled an almost over-dazzling smile and, gently disengaging his hand, pointed sweetly at the Michael Graves clock they kept on her side of the bed.
     “What’s wrong?” he asked her, trying as hard as possible to rise above his disappointment.
     “The siren song of high fashion,” she told him, laughing, “I have a shoot!”
     “You do?”
     Coal leapt delicately out of bed.
     “Yes, dummy, I do.  An hour from now.  And guess what?  It’s with you!!”
     “O god I forgot!  The Tom Ford thing!”
     “Yes,” Coal smirked. “You know, Linc, it’s a good thing you sleep with me or you’d never make any of your appointments!”
     But he was already off to the shower.
*********************************
     It had been agreed that Michael would meet in a few days with Homer, Bliss and, inevitably with Fish—at Homer’s studio, if a studio was indeed what he had—and he was now heading home, strolling east along Bloor Street, towards High Park.  He had decided suddenly, despite the diet to which had realigned himself earlier that same morning, to take up the offer of sudden 7-Eleven store, an offer emblazoned on a banner stretched taut over its wide front door: Large Brownie and Coffee for $1.19.
     Why do they use the number “7” and yet spell out “eleven”? Michael wondered idly as he entered the store.  Probably, he thinks, because “Seven-Eleven” would be too cumbersome, and “7-11” was now impossible because of “9/11.”
     He finds a clerk in an absurdly red coat pretending to sweep the floor behind the cash register.  “How much is a brownie all by itself?” Michael asks him.  “I don’t want the coffee”
     “Just the brownie alone?” Disbelief widens his eyes.
     “Yes”, Michael repeats, “just the brownie.  I don’t want the coffee”.   
     The guy busies himself with the computer, as if launched upon a thorny problem in astrophysics.  He shows little sign of answering Michael’s question, apparently more intent upon ringing up this suddenly complex new coffee-brownie sale.
      “I asked you how much for the brownie alone?” Michael repeats.  The clerk glances up, as if surprised.
     “$1.59,” he says, looking sort of smug about it.
      “$1.59?” asks Michael, certain he must have heard wrong.
     “Yep,” says the clerk, “$1.59.”
    “You mean that having just the brownie alone costs forty cents more than having a brownie with coffee?”
     The clerk looks surprised, as if this were an entirely new way of looking at it.
     “Yeh”, he says, almost abashed himself at the sudden absurdity of it.
     “But that’s stupid,” Michael says.  “That’s ridiculous.  The coffee alone is worth—what?—a buck?
     “So?” says the clerk warily, as if being led into a trap. 
     “So why wouldn’t the brownie alone be cheaper than the brownie with the coffee?”  The clerk looks both perplexed and malicious at the same time.  Michael can see him beginning to form the conventional answer to all questions of this sort.  He can see the standard words taking shape in the clerk’s mouth.  And out it comes, sure enough.
     “Company policy”.
     Michael cannot believe he is suddenly getting as angry as he is. 
     “Then you can shove your company policy up your ass!!” he yells at the clerk and storms out into the descending twilight.
     A few days later, he is passing the same store.  The sight of the place makes him angry all over again.  But he goes in.  The clerk eyes him warily—the way you’d keep tabs on a puma somebody brought into the store on a leash.
     “I’ll have a brownie and a coffee,” Michael says carefully.  The clerk punches it all into the computer, and goes slowly to get the coffee and the cake.  He plunks them both distainfully on the counter.  Michael fishes out a toonie and gleefully pockets his change.  And leaves the coffee on the counter.
     “Hey, you forgot your coffee”, the clerk calls after him.
     “I told you before, I don’t want the fucking coffee!” Michael tells him, triumphantly ushering his brownie out into the crepuscular evening.
     He feels good.  Great.  Revenge is sweet—literally, in this case.  He takes a big salacious bite of his brownie.   
     And it’s stale.
     Naturally it’s stale. 
     Of course it is
     “Too bad Fish isn’t here,” he thinks to himself, tossing the dead brownie contemptuously into the gutter. 
      The clerk grins at him all the while through the plate glass window.  Then he began mouthing something through the streaky glass.  “Company Policy” is what Michael thinks the clerk is saying.  What else would he be saying?
     Michael began thinking how much Homer Rubik was like the clerk.   And the mountainous Bliss Carmen too.  And her grotesque little dog.  Not that any of this made sense.  What did he mean by this dreadful, shared clerkness, he wondered, this horrifying clerkitude?
     He only meant, he quickly realized, that they were all standing contentedly, triumphantly, on the wrong side of the chalk-line.  And he couldn’t understand anything on that side of the line.   
     “I won’t get angry,” he said out loud, to nobody.